Robert Hurst is the author of The Art of [Urban] Cycling, The Art of Mountain Biking: Singletrack Skills for All Riders, The Cyclist's Manifesto, Best Bike Rides Denver and Boulder, Road Biking Colorado's Front Range, Mountain Biking Colorado's San Juan Mountains: Durango and Telluride, and The Bicycle Commuter's Handbook.

When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man’s moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it?

Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?

-- Twain

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This bit by Christian Parenti in The Nation is an example of lefty journalists carrying water for the oil and gas lobby, unknowingly or not, by repeating the false narrative that fracking is new technology:

As the economists say, demand calls forth supply. Just look at all the new shale gas. The United States has gone from having a twenty-year supply of known reserves to a 100-year supply, thanks to the new technology of hydraulic fracturing used to get at both gas and oil. Whatever one wants to say against the practice of fracking (and, for the record, I believe it is dangerous and so I’m against it), it has opened up huge new fossil fuel reserves and thus pushed the notion of “peak oil” further into the future. (The real problem is not too little oil, but too much oil and the pollution it causes.) In other words, technology and innovation continue to transcend the limits of supply.

Parenti is depressingly incorrect on a fundamental level. Fracking hasn’t “pushed the notion of ‘peak oil’ further into the future.” Peak Oil has dragged fracking into the present. I do agree about fracking being environmentally dangerous, but Parenti needs to spend more time researching his subject. Like five minutes more.

Even anti-fracking activists in anti-fracking pieces blindly repeat the industry’s PR that fracking and horizontal drilling are new technology. Do some research kids! It’s good! From Truth-out.org:

Advanced fracking technology has allowed gas drillers to uncover previously unavailable gas reserves from deep underground shale formations. The new technology, known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, has quickly industrialized rural communities in states across the US and become one of America’s most high profile environmental controversies.

I mean, that writer really sounds like he knows what he’s talking about with that string of words there, does he not?

Local news outlets always get it wrong. That’s their job. If they don’t, it signals something really major is about to happen, like the water getting sucked out to sea before the tsunami hits.

New technology has allowed drillers to reach oil for the first time that’s been trapped under the Kansas soil for millions of years. Horizontal fracking drills a diagonal path through the rock, releasing it with a combination of chemicals, water, and sand.

The Bakken shale formation and its bounty of oil and gas is a proving ground for hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” as the new technology loosens more than 150 million barrels a year out of the ground in Montana and neighboring North Dakota alone.